The Friday Rush: His dream deferred, Limbaugh takes a backseat to Glenn Beck

Maybe Rush Limbaugh is still torn up over the whole St. Louis Rams debacle. Imagine: A man's boyhood dream of acquiring a small nation's worth of wealth by bloviating for 15 hours a week on the radio, and then using this fortune to be a co-owner of the worst team in the NFL, was utterly crushed. Rush learned the hard way (though it's admittedly a stretch to assume he "learned" anything from this experience at all) that 20-plus years of nationally syndicated half-truths, no-truths, and obscene smears drenched in race-baiting are sometimes frowned upon when you try to cross over to the mainstream.

Much has already been said about potential consequences of a Limbaugh co-owned franchise, the fallout that resulted as the nation witnessed a man's aspirations crash and burn, and the pity party that ensued on the radio for days afterward.

But in the days since, the letters N,F, and L have mostly faded from the airwaves (minus a pity party rehash on today's show), and Rush's status as the most prominent and reliably conspiratorial conservative voice in the media has begun to wane, replaced by none other than the even-more conspiracy-obsessed Glenn Beck.

On last Friday's program, Limbaugh -- who usually pulls content for his shows from the likes of Drudge and lesser-read conservative blogs -- trumpeted the latest Glenn Beck "czar" witch hunt target by echoing Beck's ridiculous smear of White House communications director Anita Dunn. After Beck falsely claimed that Dunn "worships" "her hero" Mao Zedong, Limbaugh ran with it, charging that Mao was Dunn's "favorite murderer."

Rush never let up with the Dunn-Mao smears as the week progressed. On Tuesday, Rush said that the Obama administration "idolizes" Stalin, Lenin, Castro, and Mao. He was still at it on Wednesday and Thursday, and even found time to repeat the smear again on Friday.

The problem with the Dunn smears as forwarded by Beck and Limbaugh was that they were neither true nor persuasive. Dunn didn't actually "endorse" or "worship" Mao. As Media Matters noted:

Dunn offered no endorsement of Mao's ideology or atrocities -- rather, she commented that Mao and Mother Teresa were two of her "favorite political philosophers," and based on short quotes from them, she offered the advice that "you don't have to follow other people's choices and paths" or "let external definition define how good you are internally."

Moreover, it wasn't very damning of Dunn when you take into account that many conservatives have previously cited, praised, or reflected on the philosophies espoused by Mao in some manner.

Maybe it's not the case that Rush Limbaugh is just parroting Glenn Beck. Some might argue that "great" minds have a tendency to think alike. That's certainly the case with both Limbaugh and Beck's tinfoil hattery regarding the H1N1 virus, which is a study in "it's the same, but different."

On one hand, Beck's conspiracy theories on the virus range from sowing doubts on the vaccine to the political ramifications if one were to refuse the vaccine. On the other hand, Limbaugh has shown outright defiance over the vaccine and has since mocked media reports on children who have died from the virus. Rush has also claimed that the concerns over the virus are a tool to encourage public support for health care reform. Rush even found it "hard to disagree" (jokingly? It's hard to even tell anymore) with Louis Farrakhan, who said the purpose of the H1N1 vaccine was to kill people.

Speaking of the government's efforts to kill people, Rush was still hung up on the notion of "death panels" this week. On Monday, he read an article reporting that Florida hospitals might be told to bar some patients in the case of a "severe" flu pandemic. Brace yourself for the crazy:

LIMBAUGH: By the way, South Florida hospitals have decided to beat President Obama to the punch where the swine flu, the H1N1 virus, is concerned. South Florida hospitals have said if you're in the advanced stages of cancer, multiple sclerosis, you won't be given a hospital bed, they must save room for victims of the H1N1 virus. Yeah, yeah, I got it here. Death panels in South Florida have been empaneled, regardless.

That's right -- Barack Obama is getting "beat ... to the punch" on death panels by the Republican-controlled state of Florida. (Ignore Rush's emphasis on "South Florida" -- the article describes that the proposed guidelines would be statewide.)

But it wasn't long before Limbaugh went from his usual fearmongering on death panels to actually becoming his own death panel. On Tuesday, Rush advanced a false claim that New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin "proposed" instituting carbon credits for having fewer children. Fed up with "militant environmentalists," Rush advised Revkin to "just go kill" himself:

LIMBAUGH: This guy from The New York Times, if he really thinks that humanity is destroying the planet, humanity is destroying the climate, that human beings in their natural existence are going to cause the extinction of life on Earth -- Andrew Revkin. Mr. Revkin, why don't you just go kill yourself and help the planet by dying?

In a blog post responding to Limbaugh's suggestion, Revkin explained the context of his "thought experiment" on "the population part of the climate and energy challenge."

For someone who has been so worked up about death panels in recent months, Rush sure was eager to participate in a death panel of his own making.

There's one more escapade deserving of mockery from this week in Limbaugh. On Friday, Rush eagerly ran with a blog post by Michael Ledeen claiming to have an excerpt from Obama's undergrad thesis, which went like this:

The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.

Ledeen sourced the excerpt to an obscure conservative blogger, who claimed it had come out in Time's Joe Klein research for "an upcoming special edition about the President." To make a long story short, the excerpt was revealed to be completely fabricated.

So after running with the fake quote, Rush was soon alerted to his mistake and owned up to it -- sort of:

LIMBAUGH: So we have to hold out the possibility that this is not accurate. However, I have had this happen to me recently. I've had quotes attributed to me that were made up. And when it was pointed out to the media that the quotes were made up, they said, "It doesn't matter. We know Limbaugh thinks it anyway."

[...]

LIMBAUGH: I'm also told that the blog containing the passage on Obama's thesis is a satire blog. ... But we know he thinks it. Good comedy, to be comedy, must contain an element of truth, and we know how he feels about distribution of wealth; he's mad at the courts for not going far enough on it. So we stand by the fabricated quote because we know Obama thinks it anyway. That's how it works in the media today.

It might not seem like much, but that's as close to a correction as one gets on The Rush Limbaugh Show.